It is increasingly common for computer users to collaborate with other computer users outside their administrative levels such as outside their own office, department, corporation, communication network, and so forth. In each of these cases, collaboration between users span multiple administrative security levels. One example of such collaboration is in manufacturing “supply chains,” which comprise the often complex chains of supplier/consumer relationships that culminate in the production of a manufactured good, and documents may be shared between members of such supply chains. Another example is when patient records are shared between medical service providers and insurance companies. Another example is wiki webpages jointly edited by multiple users. Still another example is from the Defense or Intelligence communities, in which users may be assigned to different “security levels,” and all documents produced by a user associated with a particular security level may need to be able to store such documents at the security level of the user. Such a user may also need to be able to access, at least to a certain degree, documents or at least copies of documents produced by users belonging to other security level in order for all of the users to seamlessly collaborate with each other without violating the different administrative security levels.
In these situations, collaboration between users associated with different security levels may consist of viewing and/or editing of documents or copies of such documents produced by users belonging to the different security level. These documents may be, for example, word processing documents, image files, video, audio presentations, web pages, website structures, and so forth.
Current support for enabling collaboration across security levels is limited to transmitting a copy of a document to be shared properly “cleansed” between different security levels from one side to the other (i.e., from one security level to another security level). If users of either side need to make proprietary (or secret) modifications to the document, they need to keep a copy of the document with the modifications private, and only transmit a version of the document having only information the transmitting party is willing to share with the receiving party. For example, a higher security level user has to take overt actions to remove, delete or otherwise shield the changes made to a document through a higher security level that are not to be shared with users of a lower security level to ensure the changes are kept confidential from the users belonging to the lower security level.
In some situations, a problem may arise when a first user belonging to a lower security level releases a modified version of a document to a second user belonging to a higher security level because the modified version of the document may conflict with a version of the document that has been modified by the second user. That is, the problem is one of document change management, for example, keeping the changes that came from outside a higher security level (e,g., modifications made at a lower security level) organized with respect to those that came from inside the higher security level(and thus must be kept private). Thus, robust systems and methods for addressing the complexity of managing multiple documents shared between multiple security levels may be very desirable.